This invention generally relates to systems and methods for simulating containment vessels (hereinafter “containers”) containing liquid. Such systems are useful, for example, in design-phase engineering simulations of liquid fuel-carrying vehicles. Such systems may also have application in reducing the number of sensors in a fuel tank for determining fuel level, or in correlating liquid levels and volume amounts in geological formations such as water reservoirs and oil deposits.
It is known to compute fuel distributions in aircraft wings for different wing attitudes, different bank and yaw angles, and different wing deflections using rectangular sliced approximations of the interior shape of the wing. That known solution has the following disadvantages: (1) it is tied to a specific geometric shape and topology (i.e., a wing); (2) it requires extensively formatted and reduced geometric representations of structural inputs to function; (3) it uses approximate solution methods and therefore does not provide an accurate solution; (4) the existing software is written in FORTRAN, which is complex, hard to maintain and hard to enhance; (5) the existing software is hard to integrate with other solutions (e.g., computation of an airplane's center of gravity subject to different flight angles); (6) analysis results are exchanged through proprietary file formats that require custom coding to read and write.
There is a need for improved systems and methods for accurately computing liquid levels (also referred to herein as “liquid surface plane locations”) for an arbitrarily shaped containment vessel at different spatial orientations in static or dynamic situations (e.g., the containment vessel is accelerating in a particular direction).